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03/02/2008

The New Gender Gap in Education--Posner's Comment

It is no surprise that female enrollment in college has increased over the last half century. The later age of marriage and childbearing and the greatly increased job opportunities of women explain the trend. Another factor, stressed by Becker in his pathbreaking economic analysis of the family, is increased emphasis on quality rather than quantity of children; parental education is an important factor in the quality of children.
The fact that women tend on average to get better grades in college helps to explain their lower dropout rate, but this is nothing new; even in the era when women dropped out of college to marry and have children, they had higher grades than men. That women are better students than men is pretty much a constant--and a puzzle.
When one observes members of one group outperforming another in a competitive environment in which, therefore, substitution of inputs is possible, a possible explanation is discrimination against the members of the superior group. If a college wants to have the the best students it can attract, and the women attending the college have better grades than the men who attend it, something is wrong--the school could increase the quality of its student body by admitting more women and fewer men. That it does not do so may be because it values other gender-dependent factors--for example, female students may prefer a lower ratio of female to male students than a purely meritocratic admissions policy would produce, and this preference may influence the college's admissions decisions. But this is unlikely to be a good explanation for the superior female academic performance today. The incentive to discriminate against female college applicants was much stronger in the old days, yet the female-male performance gap has not (so far as I can discover) diminished.
Women might outperform men academically because they worked harder, and they might work harder because they had more to gain from completing college successfully and doing so with high grades. But as Becker points out, since male participation in the labor force continues (and probably will continue) to exceed that of women, and since there is a large wage premium for college graduates, men actually have more to gain from completing college than women do. Yet not only do they drop out at a higher rate; but male college enrollment has not increased nearly as rapidly as female college enrollment has. Women are not just catching up with men on the educational front; they are becoming better educated than men.
So there are two puzzles: why women get better grades than men, and why men have a lower elasticity of response to the effect of education on earnings than women do. At this stage of our knowledge, the answers to these questions must be highly speculative; what follows, then, is guesswork.
The first question is, though, I think, a little easier than the second. From the standpoint of most teachers, right up to and including the level of teachers of college undergraduates, the ideal student is well behaved, unaggressive, docile, patient, meticulous, and empathetic in the sense of intuiting the response to the teacher that is most likely to please the teacher. Those are traits less characteristic of boys than of girls. Moreover, there is more variance in IQ among boys than girls--to exaggerate, more morons and more geniuses--and both the morons and the geniuses are difficult for most teachers, the morons for obvious reasons, the geniuses because they are easily bored in a class geared to the comprehension of the average student. So girls are easier to teach, and so are "rewarded" (not deliberately) with higher average grades.
Nothing in the suggested answers to the first question, however, can explain why males should be less responsive to the growing value of a college education than females. One possibility is that there is nothing more that men can do to improve their academic performance, given genetic limitations. Notice the curious fact that the more men in the lower tail of the male IQ distribution drop out at some stage in their academic career, the higher the average grades of the men who remain school should be; the "genius" tail pulls up the average, while the "moron" tail, being depleted because of dropouts, pulls it down less than it would if the students in that tail did not drop out disproportionately and thus cease to figure in the determination of grades. Maybe the "genius" tail, because of the publicity that its members attract, has obscured the fact that women may on average be more intelligent, or at least have innately a suite of qualities more supportive of academic perfornance, than men. The key is "innately." If aggressiveness and other psychological or cognitive qualities that inhibit male academic performance are innate, men may have maxed out long ago, while women did not reach their peak then because of factors extraneous to ability, such as lack of demand for women in high-skilled jobs, until recently.
Another possibility is that the decline of the conventional "patriarchal" family since the 1960s has been harder on boys than on girls. Because of rampant divorce and illegitimacy, a boy's biological father is less likely to be a continuous presence during the boy's formative years, and this is only one factor in what appears to be a decline in the disciplining of children. If docility is as I have suggested a factor in academic performance, a decline in discipline is more likely to harm the academic performance of boys than of girls because the former need more discipline to instill docility in them. It is difficult to test this hypothesis empirically, however, because grade inflation bedevils any effort to use changes in average grades over time as a measure of the trend in academic performance.
But, to repeat, these suggested answer to the puzzle of the gender education gap are highly speculative--a stimulus (I hope) to further thought, not the end of the inquiry.

A remote possibility not mentioned by Becker nor Posner is the effect of college culture. The behavioral expectations of college males (think of the traditional activity of fraternities as an example) developed during a period of decreased competition in college (fewer people went to college, and they were competing only with other males). These lingering diminished expectations could be negatively affecting the performance of college males today by lowering their grades and contributing to their increased likelihood of dropping out. Pure speculation though.

I'd suggest that there may be some relationship between the gender gap in education generally, and the reverse gap which prevails in math, physics, and the engineering disciplines.

Generally, docility is not a desirable trait in students of the latter. The early courses (in math and physics at least where I have personal experience) strongly favor energetic approaches to problem solving over mere implementation of method, and give a good amount of "bragging rights" to the student who understands the more quickly. Clarity of understanding and intuition is prized over meticulous attention to detail, and empathy with the teacher counts for little in the end.

This approach need not be the only way to teaching a rigorous science curriculum. Early biology courses (I am told) require far more memorization and attention to detail -- and the gender ratios are much less skewed in biology and chemistry than they are in math and physics.

The brains of girls and boys are different. Boys learn differently. But schools are geared to girls and the ways that girls learn.

Boys need male role models. Fatherless families leave boys without role models. Early education teachers are 90% plus likely to be female. Boys need male teachers for role modeling and discipline, as well as for empathetic teaching.

The education system is geared in all ways toward the success of girls, and either indifferent or hostile toward boys. No wonder that boys fall behind.

This post raises interesting questions and I look forward to reading comments posted by sociologists who may offer insight. But I was most struck not by the issues raised about grade point averages and graduation rates, but by the important (and encouraging) fact that so many more women are enrolling in college to begin with. The same holds true in the nation's law schools, were enrollment numbers for women generally match that of men. We have certainly come a very long way since 1959, when Justice O'Conner, after graduation from law school, was offered a job as a legal secretary. The numbers underlying Becker's and Posner's posts are a tribute, it seems to me, to the country's evolution in the area of gender equality. As for the issues of male versus female performance in college, we'll see in another 40 years how this dynamic works itself out. Do we even need answers to these questions? Perhaps it is enough to let academic darwinism, as it were, take its course.

I have to go now. I have a trig mid-term in the morning and I'm all out of beer.

At least part of the gap may be due to women having more to lose from dropping out of college than men, a negative motivation.
Single women are paid less than single men. Well-paying job opportunities for an average single woman without a college degree are far fewer than those for men.
Women without college degrees are less likely to marry men with college degrees, so married women without college degrees are likely to be in families which earn less than their degree-holding peers. Even if they both work, the degree-less family is likely to earn less than the average a college-degreed man and nonworking wife.
Thus, an average woman living either single or married without a college degree is at a considerable financial disadvantage - which may at least help explain why women are more motivated to complete college.

I am surprised not to see the mention of technological innovation or global trade in this analysis.

For example over the last 40 years technological advances have greatly reduced the relative number of secretaries in offices in the US because many professionals can do much of their own secretarial work. Whereas in the past a fairly intelligent young woman could obtain a position in an office environment with just a high school education, today more positions in an office environment require a college degree so that is what the young woman pursues.

Looking at a trade example, it has been widely noted that increased international trade has had the greatest adverse impact on low skilled workers many of whom happen to be women. Textile workers come to mind here. Given the reduced prospects for low skilled workers women are choosing to pursue higher education to insulate them from competition.

To take a counter example, careers in a trade skill are essentially immune to increases in international trade and probably only weakly influenced by technological innovation so that they still provide a viable choice to a young man would would prefer not to continue his formal education beyond high school or a trade school.

Don't post until you've read The War Against Boys. It's crucial to everyone's understanding of why boys are starting to trail girls in everything. [For the most part. It's also true that the skills of the future are those that women are more innately skilled at, such as people skills.]

I wonder if men don't put less effort into grades because they will find jobs and career success on the basis of other qualities and factors--charisma, teamwork, client skills, leadership qualities, connections--that, for better or worse, come into play to a lesser degree when employers screen female applicants, for whom academic achievement is the leading hiring criterion. I seem to recall a study of Ivy League graduates that showed a weaker correlation between undergraduate grades and career success than a correlation between participation in college team sports and career success.

So there is a question here of participation rates and of performance and here are two add'l reasons:

1) Participation: as has been alluded to, men probably have more options than females, mostly in the form of options which require more physical, as opposed to mental, inputs. For example, there are many more physical (athletics) and violent (anything illegal) options available to males, especially across the lower socio-economic spectrum.

2) Performance: The proportion of men taking classes in "hard sciences/maths" where grading is generally more quantifiable and thus stricter is far greater than women. Women tend to focus more on the "soft studies" such as sociology, where paper essays are the grading norm (those being much more subjective and generally easily curved). A more interesting (and much debated) issue is why such a convergence takes place--this blog may have addressed this some time ago.

There is some evidence that men are distracted by women in the classroom, but not vice versa. Basically, men think about having sex with the women they attend class with, while women think about what the professor is saying.

The comments by James and J combine interestingly in the much noted phenomenon of increased participation of women in law school. Historically, as their participation rate rose to 50 percent in law schools their performance has remained below 40 percent for graduation in the top tenth of the class at nationally selective law schools. At the more selective, post-graduate level of education the Summers heresy of greater male variability in talent may play itself out more than at the undergraduate level.

Women have too much to lose by not graduating from college. Economic self-sufficiency is very important whether married or single. In spite of being excellent students, when women get to the workplace they still earn something like 70 cents on the dollar vis-a-vis men. Is this how men even the score or are they unable to see the talents of women and thus, value them? When a woman doesn't have a degree, it is held against her. A man is not held to that workplace requirement. There are always mitigating factors that favor men.

As others have mentioned, I view this as primarily an issue of a different set of employment options available to men.

Many low-education jobs for men remain in fields that pay decently, but are physically dangerous or just generally unwelcoming to women: Automotive services, construction, resource harvesting, police and firefighters, security, combat-oriented military etc.
For men that do not enjoy school, these areas continue to provide attractive alternatives. At such as young age, the prospect of another half decade of unenjoyable schooling looms large in terms of opportunity costs, especially when your 'long run' plans stetch out maybe 10 years.

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